Field of the Invention
The present concerns a method to automatically generate a selected image data set from the entirety of a medical measurement data of an examination subject. Moreover, the invention concerns a system to automatically generate a selected image data set from the entirety of a medical measurement data of an examination subject.
Description of the Prior Art
For specific medical questions, regionally limited partial regions of an examination subject (such as a human body) are typically acquired with the use of imaging systems. For this purpose, the technician who conducts such a scan defines reconstruction parameters in advance before implementation of the scan by selecting a suitable scan protocol, and/or afterwards, depending on patient-specific requirements or in the interest of locating an abnormality.
However, in some cases it is necessary to scan larger partial regions of the patient or even his entire body in one pass in order to cover different areas of the body (or body regions; the two terms are used herein synonymously). For example, this is the case for body scans for comprehensive cancer diagnosis (for instance to detect metastases) or for polytrauma patients (for example patients after severe accidents). Different body regions (which are often also situated far from one another) of the body are thus scanned. Such body regions are (for example) the head, neck, thoracic and abdominal regions. These body regions are therefore situated one after another along the z-axis of a tomography system, i.e. along the direction in which the examination subject on a patient bed is introduced into the tomography system. In other words, they have a different coverage in the z-direction (thus a different z-coverage), and they may overlap somewhat in the z-direction. The measurement data (in particular the already reconstructed image data) from such larger-area scans can then be relayed in its entirety to a diagnosis workstation, for example, where the data are used for findings by a radiologist or by a specialist physician. However, the further use of this complete series of measurement data for assessment of individual partial regions (for instance individual organs) of the body is then very complicated, because now the assessor has more image data than are needed, and must still make numerous modifications after the fact, for instance a navigation to the body region to be assessed (windowing) or even the loading of multiple different whole-body series with different reconstruction parameters.
Therefore, it is preferred to pass the reconstructed image data separately (according to body regions) to a specialist who is concerned only with an individual data set. For this purpose, it is currently necessary for a technician or radiologist to subdivide the overall image data according to body regions in the form of sets known as DICOM data series, before he or she relays the data to the respective specialist. For this purpose, for each of the DICOM data series, the technician must define reconstruction parameters such as the respective windowing, the kernel (i.e. the convolution kernel in the reconstruction) and the slice interval of individual slice images of the image data from one another.
This process is time-consuming and laborious, and therefore is poorly suited to the clinical environment, in which tomography systems should be utilized as efficiently as possible, and in which the treatment speed (especially in the case of polytrauma patients) is decisive to being able to save a life or specific, endangered bodily functions.